Proxy basics

Proxy basics

Everything in ZeroTrace Proxy is built around one idea: take a list of proxies and find out what you actually have. A raw list is just text — some entries are dead, some are slow, some leak your real address, and only a few are worth using. The workbench turns that list into a graded, filtered set you can rely on.

The tools

The core tools each answer one question about a proxy:

• Parse — reads any proxy list and cleans it up. It understands the many ways a proxy can be written (host and port, with or without a username and password, with or without a scheme like HTTP or SOCKS) and normalizes every entry into a consistent form.
• Check — tests whether a proxy is alive, how fast it responds, which protocol it really speaks, and how anonymous it is (whether the destination can tell you are using a proxy).
• Extract — pulls proxies out of raw sources — a blob of text, an HTML page, or a JSON response — so you can harvest a list from wherever you found it. With your license it can also draw from curated Cloud sources.
• Benchmark — runs a proxy several times to measure not just its speed but how consistent that speed is.
• Leak test — checks whether a proxy quietly reveals your real address through tell-tale signs, so you can drop the ones that give you away.
• Geo — enriches a proxy with its country and network so you know where it exits.
• Viewer — fetches a web page through a proxy so you can see exactly what a site sees when you use it. See Viewer.
• Chain validate — dials through an ordered sequence of proxies to confirm a multi-hop route actually works end to end. This is the foundation of the Chain Engine.

The first two of these — parse, check and extract — are covered in detail on Parse, check & extract; leak testing and benchmarking on Leak test & benchmark.

The shape of a run

The tools cover different jobs but share the same rhythm, so once you have run one you know how to run them all:

1. Give it an input

   Paste or load a proxy list, or the raw source you want to pull proxies from. The tool tells you what it expects.

2. Run it

   Start the check, test, or benchmark. Work runs in the background as a task, so you can queue several and keep working.

3. Read the results

   Results come back in a table laid out for the job — alive or dead, latency, protocol, anonymity, score — so you can scan and sort them.

4. Send the good ones on

   Save useful proxies to a pool, or hand a result straight to another tool — feed checked proxies into a benchmark, a chain, or a rotator.

Pools, tasks, and hand-offs

A few ideas tie the tools together:

• Pools are named collections of proxies you keep. When a check turns up good proxies, you save them to a pool; later tools draw from that pool instead of a fresh paste.
• Tasks are how every run works. Each run becomes a task in a queue you can watch, run now or schedule, stop, and re-run. Because runs are tasks, you are never stuck waiting on one before starting the next.
• Hand-offs ("send-to") pass a result from one tool to another without copying and pasting — the survivors of a check go straight into a benchmark, a chain, or a rotator.